


level up

by andibeth82



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Budapest, Clint Needs a Hug, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Nightmares, Partnership, Post-Avengers (2012), Psychological Trauma, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-03 09:51:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1069053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/pseuds/andibeth82
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is what Clint Barton and Natasha Romanov remember about Budapest: Love is for children, love is a debt.</p><p>(Post Avengers. It takes more than one person to fight monsters and unmakings.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	level up

**Author's Note:**

> Too many recent Avengers rewatches and too many "fix-it" feelings are to blame. And I never did write about Budapest...
> 
> Thanks to [bobsessive](http://bobsessive.tumblr.com) for beta, pushes and general cheerleading. And to [fidesangelus](http://fidesangelus.tumblr.com) who came through when I needed to brainstorm what Natasha would have on her bookshelf.

This is what Clint Barton remembers about Budapest: There was a girl and she raised her gun, she took a shot and she meant to kill.

This is what Natasha Romanov remembers about Budapest: There was a boy and he raised his bow, he took a shot and he meant to kill.

 

***

 

The safe house roughly seven and a half miles outside of the city is the first place she takes him, and at the time, he’s too busy looking over his shoulder to consider why she would even _have_ a safe house in Budapest, of all places, of all the fucking places.

(She reads his mind anyway, the way she’s prone to do, only this time it catches him off guard as if it were five years ago all over again.)

“I’m a spy, Clint. I don’t think I need to explain my reasoning to you.”

She unlocks the front door, working her fingers through a complicated array of bolts and chains, and he shifts his weight on the porch behind her. Clint Barton knows better than to attempt to even shift his eyes in her direction – there are few things in Natasha’s life that are truly, wholly, absolutely hers and he knows that she guards each one of them with intense ferocity. He also knows that if she wanted him to know how to open the door properly, her body language would have suggested as much.

Still, just because he can’t watch her doesn’t mean he can’t take in the landscape, the drooping tree line and the sky darkening under the guise of an early fall, the road that stretches from the side of the house into the distance, an endgame to something he can’t quite perceive. He turns back, focusing on the way the muscles in her spine constrict through the fabric of her thin tank top as she twists her hand around the metal knob.

She ushers him inside wordlessly, eyes drawn downward, and reaches for a light switch. After a few moments of muttering and some additional cursing, he blinks against sudden brightness as the room develops a soft, dim glow.

“Now what?”

Natasha slams the door and tosses her phone to the bed, yanking the comm unit out of her ear with one rapid move. It clatters to the floor unceremoniously and she brings her foot down, hard, before kicking it across the room.

“Now, we wait.”

 

***

 

Contrary to popular belief, waiting is not Clint’s strong suit. He’s used to waiting when he’s on guard, when he needs to find a target, he can sit unmoving for hours on end if he knows he has something to focus on and a job to do. But just waiting to wait – for resolution, for acceptance, for something he can’t predict – it’s not easy and it’s certainly not comforting. It is, however, something that Natasha is acutely aware of, has become aware of over the course of their relationship on and off the field.

“If you want to go shoot stuff, there’s a nice open space a few yards from here,” she comments when she notices how his fingers twitch against the curve of his leg, though the rest of his body remains rigidly still. “No one around here for miles, so you don’t have to worry about killing someone.”

He doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t expect him to – she knows he won’t give her the satisfaction of being right, of knowing him better than he knows himself. When he thinks she’s not looking, he slips out with his bow and nocks an arrow between the strings, lets loose a few rounds that lodge themselves into tree trunks. It’s not exactly the same as putting an arrow through Loki’s eye socket - or for that matter, through the neck of a Chitauri soldier - but it does make him feel better, useful, like he’s doing more than just _waiting_ for someone to tell him that he’s okay.

He’s not really sure if he’s okay – he knows he isn’t - but he can pretend, for her sake.

 

***

 

On the fifth day, Natasha disappears before he can get up and returns before he can properly get out of bed. When he finally does stumble his way down the stairs and into the small kitchen, she’s already dressed and sitting cross legged at the table, the tea kettle just beginning to whistle. Clint hits irritably at the knob of the stove before the sound gets shrill enough to be annoying, then gropes for the handles of the cupboard, squinting at the dark shelves.

“Jesus, your lighting _sucks_.”

“It’s fine,” Natasha responds, methodically raising and lowering her tea bag. “Besides, I don’t see the point of paying for more than I need when I’m rarely here.”

Clint ignores her, sticking his head further into the cabinet, and after a beat he lets out a groan.

“Oh god. _Please_ tell me we’re not out of coffee.”

“Relax. There’s a pack of instant in the back, next to the bowls. Not the strongest stuff, but you won’t mind.”

“You’re right.” Clint drops the small packet into his mug and turns, picking up the smoking kettle. “Though it could use some –”

“Left side of the fridge, which you would’ve known if you’d opened it since you’ve been here,” she interrupts without looking up from her breakfast. He huffs out a laugh before he can stop himself and she looks up at the sound, lips twitching slightly as he takes his place across from her.

“We’re still waiting.” It’s a question disguised as a statement, and he grabs for the small bottle of milk as Natasha regards him evenly.

“We’re waiting as long as we need to,” she answers pointedly. Clint frowns.

“As long as we need to – your words, not theirs?”

“Not anyone’s.” Natasha puts down her fork carefully, spreading her hands on the table. “The only word I have is from Fury, and that’s not something that concerns you right now. But you should know and believe that I’m not acting on anyone’s orders except my own.”

Clint chews on the inside of his lip. “It was Fury’s decision to send us off the grid.”

“Yes. To get you – us – away from New York, and from everything that happened.” She pauses, reaching for her tea. “But it was my decision to take you here.”

“Yeah, and did you do that for you or for me?”

Natasha stops with the cup halfway to her lips, suddenly looking more than a little uncomfortable. Her shoulders drop in a way that’s uncharacteristically unguarded and he sighs at the movement, leaning back until he’s balancing himself against the table with only his knees.

“Well…I guess it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“I told you,” she repeats slowly. “It’s going to take time.”

Clint lets himself fall forward, the chair legs landing against the floor with a harsh crack that resonates throughout the otherwise silent room. “And you think that coming back here, of all places, is going to help.”

There’s a look in Natasha’s eyes that seems weak and defeated, a look not unlike the one he remembers seeing when he first pulled himself out of Loki’s brainwashing, a look that he knows she thought she had buried and hidden and locked away before he got a glimpse of what it meant.

“I never said I thought it would help.” She picks up her fork again, squeezing it a little too hard, and he tries to ignore the way her voice wavers on the edge of something that, if poked and prodded and pushed enough, could dissolve into hysterics.

“But it might be a start.”

 

***

 

Clint spends his days reading, for the first time in a long time, actual books instead of S.H.I.E.L.D. files or mission reports. Natasha has a stack of magazines on the living room table that date at least five years back and he gets some amusement out of going through pictures of celebrities well past their fifteen minutes of fame; once he runs out of those, he moves on to the bookshelf.

It’s a curious selection, one that he would never have guessed could exist in any of Natasha’s residences, safe house or not. Some fantasy – Tolkien and Lewis – some philosophy, and a rather large collection of fairytales, each antique tome displaying a different language along its wide spine. He plucks out the first title he sees, mostly because it’s the only one in English - _Little Red Riding Hood_ \- and stretches out on the couch with his legs tucked underneath him, loses track of time until he hears the soft opening of the door and her footsteps against the wood.

“You should see what I have in my secret stash,” is all she says when her eyes drop on his choice of text, and he thinks maybe she could criticize him about the subconscious meaning behind why he selected it, but he knows she won’t.

The truth is, everything about the house and the environment and even the situation itself is peaceful in a way that he never would have envisioned, and he starts to wonder if maybe Natasha was right. Maybe it wouldn’t have been as easy to detach, to sit with a book and be overwhelmed by silence if he was in his apartment, or in S.H.I.E.L.D. quarters, or in Stark Tower, or anywhere near New York. But the only reprieve is during the day, when he can do things that keep his mind off what did and didn’t and could have happened. At night, he wakes up from dreams bathed in glowing blue, soulless eyes that reach through the darkness to grab at the sides of his skull, their twisted grins pressing into his brain. He won’t cry, he’ll never cry, but his body will shake and his breath will come in gasps until she finds his hand, a safe haven and a silent _it will be okay_ even though they both know the sentiment is a lie.

“What do you think is waiting for us when we get back?” He doesn’t tell her he’s once again given up sleep for the night but figures that she assumes as much when she puts her head against his chest, her breath a warm beat against his skin.

“What do you think?” There’s a clear edge to her voice, one that he takes to mean _you already know what the answer is and I want you to tell me_. He makes a face in the dark.

“Psych eval.”

“Yes,” Natasha says shortly, sitting up and sliding her head off his body. Clint sighs, running a hand through his hair over and over until he’s threaded the short, spikey strands into sharp points that stick up across his scalp.

“Fucking fantastic.”

“Hey.” Natasha pulls his face towards her, two fingers tight around the bottom of his chin. “You’re my partner, remember? I get a say.” She traces a thumb over his cheekbone. “I promise that I won’t let them put you back in the field until you’re alright. Or at least, until I think you are.”

He knows the words are meant to be a comfort, but instead they feel like a punch in the gut. The sensation makes him want to throw up, this feeling of an undeserving second chance when he shouldn’t be trusted by anyone, much less the woman beside him who, for some reason, isn’t put off by the fact that he spent days inside someone else’s head, wasted dozens of bullets by killing _his own people_. He feels the moisture prick at the edge of his eyes but it stays within the confines of his lids, even as he blinks rapidly, willing it to fall.

_You have a heart._

Clint jerks his head to the side without thinking, shakes the voice and the blue from his brain and attempts to refocus himself by concentrating on the rhythmic movement of her thumb working its way down his face.

“Thanks.”

He knows she can hear the rush of his heartbeat, his body struggling to starve off and then steady the anxiety rising and falling inside his chest, but Natasha says nothing as she folds her body back into bed, her touch a continued constant beat against his skin.

 

***

 

The next day, he’s the one making coffee – and her tea – a product of feeling as though he owes it to her for being as patient as she has been, and of not being able to sleep for more than an hour at a time. She ambles from the bedroom long after the sun has risen, her black sweatpants riding low on her hips, and joins him on the couch instead of going off on her usual insistence that they use the table. Closer, he can see the still fading bruises that line the exposed skin above her waist, the light bags starting to form underneath her eyes, and he immediately feels a swell of guilt, a sense of sick responsibility for everything that’s been broken even though he’s well aware she’s been fighting her own nightmares that she’s refused to share.

“I know I need to do something but I just…can’t,” he says in advance of the lecture he knows is coming, because it’s Natasha, and it would be stupid to think otherwise. She raises an eyebrow in surprise.

“Well, I appreciate that you’re at least not trying to hide it from me.”

Clint looks up guiltily. “Would it have worked if I had?”

“No,” she answers with the same look that she’d given him after he woke up, after he asked her if she knew what it felt like to be unmade. A stupid question, one that he had regretted the instant the words left his mouth because he knew, he _knew_ , but at the same time, he had needed that kind of verbal understanding from the one person he trusted, even if the act of asking made him look like an idiot. Natasha sips her tea slowly.

“What do you see, when you sleep?”

“How do you know I see things? People dream in the dark, you know.”

“Clint, please.” She reaches forward and suddenly the feeling of her hand on his skin is too much, and everything feels too close, and it doesn’t matter that they’ve been curled into each other’s bodies for days, it just all of a sudden feels _too close_ and he can see the battle scars that are still too fresh, he can remember the exact places where he gave similar ones to people who would never have a chance to feel them heal. The thought sears his brain, working its way into his heart, and his chest aches with grief.

“Go away,” he snarls and Natasha draws back, arms crossed over her chest.

“Is that really what you want?”

Her eyes follow as he lowers his head to his hands, as if he’s trying to find the courage to gather himself completely before answering, and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen him look so lost in his own skin.

“Bodies.” His voice comes out hoarsely, as if it’s been five days since he’s talked instead of five seconds. “Everything is blue and hazy and disoriented and…and him. I see him.” He stops, feeling the words constrict in his throat.

“And what do you do?”

He raises his head at the question, his eyes turning a color that she knows she’s only seen once, in a place by this name, for a very different reason.

“I kill,” he spits out, his fingers clenching and unclenching in his palm. “I have a lot of anger, so I direct it at the people that I know, that I recognize, but it doesn’t matter because he’s telling me to do things so I just _kill_.”

Natasha sits back, regards him carefully, giving him a once over that he feels he’d care more about if he had any actual idea what she was thinking. After a silence that seems to stretch into eternity, she nods slowly, moving away from the couch.

“Okay.”

That’s all she says: _Okay_. And it’s almost enough break him, because he knows that no one else in the whole damn world would be as forgiving about what he did, not his circus handlers, not Fury, not Hill, not even the other Avengers, he knows that no one except Natasha would understand, would just nod and then say _okay_ when he had murdered his own men and destroyed his own team and came closer than he would ever admit to killing his best friend.

It would be good to cry, he knows that’s why she’s up and left him alone in the room, hell, he knows she expects it and that she won’t judge him, won’t even ask him. But he’s never been one to express his emotions so openly and so he pushes them back, picks up his book from the coffee table, reads the same two lines of text over and over again until his eyes gloss over and she’s calling him for lunch.

 

***

 

He kills her first.

It’s always a little different, as dreams normally are, and sometimes there are two or three that come before, agents with name tags burned into his brain because he knows them without even looking at their faces, the ones who trained him and fed him and gave him the benefit of the doubt when he brought in a seemingly detached assassin from Russia, parroting her as the person that could change their organization for the better.

So this is the favor he repays them, the ones that were kind enough to be his friend: He puts arrows into their bodies in all the right places, enough to take them down, enough so that they’ll last probably just in time for Medical to arrive, in which case it’ll probably be too late and good fucking riddance.

By the time he sees her, she’s materialized almost out of nowhere, just as she did when they found each other on the detention level of the Helicarrier. He knows Natasha Romanov, Natalia Romanova, he knows what she’s done and how she’s lived, that she’s unfailingly loyal and desperate for love and acceptance. He knows that she considers him her home in a world where she’s never quite had one.

So this is the favor he repays her, the debt that he swore he would never be able to give back: He blocks her hands, which are gripping the already strung arrow, and pushes back until she twists sideways, her strength flinging him back against the floor. He gets the knife from his pants as his bow clatters uselessly onto the ground and heaves himself upwards, catching her off guard as she tries to block his path, securing her in a chokehold with the stem of the blade tight between his fingers. It’s a good feeling, the only feeling, more so than scared eyes or a hammering heart or the small, barely discernable breath of his name from her lips, a last plea to break through the barriers of noise and nothingness.

He drags the knife across her throat with ease, without thinking, and flings her sideways as she crumples into his arms like a doll. Her red hair is indistinguishable from the blood that pools around her body and as he places stained hands over the railing, staring coldly at the floor, the image is burned into his brain: Natasha red and lifeless and bleeding out, while Loki’s voice winds its way through his mind, pushing at the edges that attempt to fight back, a feeble cry of reality against a world masked in fantasy.

_My condolences, Agent Barton. But thanks to your commendable actions on my behalf, it seems as though you’ve spared her the red that she so desperately longed to escape._

In his dream, he screams. In the small house seven and a half miles outside of Budapest, he also screams, and by the time she’s helped him wake up, helped him bring his mind back to her, back to whole and alive and _I’m not going anywhere, I promise,_ he’s convinced himself it will never be okay, not even with her hands on his shoulders and her voice in his ear and the comforter wrapped tightly around his body as if she’s trying to shield him from the memories that threaten to be his undoing.

He can’t thank her, he can’t explain it to her, he can’t use the buffer that he’s fine.

He can’t even cry.

 

***

 

Four days later, she brings him a wrapped package that contains at least a dozen new arrows, all formatted for different use. He doesn’t bother to ask where they came from – he knows he won’t get an answer – and she watches as he unwraps them with shaking fingers, moving his thumb over each curve and detail as if he’s trying to convince himself that it’s all real.

Six days later, when it’s raining too hard to do anything productive outside of the walls of the house, she migrates to the couch without speaking and drops her head onto his arm, the hem of her Rolling Stones tee skirting against his wrist.

“That’s mine,” he says suddenly, the dismay in his voice betrayed only by the confusion shadowing his face. Natasha shrugs.

“So?” _It’s not like we haven’t been wearing each other’s clothes for years_ , her eyes continue silently as Clint looks down.

“Whatever.”

“You can have it back,” she offers as his chin lifts, the teasing lightened by the way her body relaxes, openly vulnerable. Clint swallows, wipes his suddenly clammy hands on the pockets of his jeans and fights down the lump taking up residence in his throat.

“No thanks. It’s not that important.”

A fleeting look of disappointment passes over her face before she neutralizes her expression, her fingers closing over his kneecap. She leans back into him and he lets his head fall back on the couch as he closes his eyes, silent until her foot nudges against his leg.

“What was that fairytale about? The one that you were reading the other day?”

Clint exhales, shifting his weight as he opens his eyes, knowing that at least ten different questions exist in the one that Natasha is trying to ask.

“It’s your book,” he responds finally, harshly. “Shouldn’t you know?”

She sits up, her eyes a little too bright. “To be honest, I haven’t read anything on this bookshelf in five years.”

Her words are pointed, her aim as good as he’s taught her, meant to hit exactly at the space of his heart that he’s carved out for this specific memory, the one that she knows like the back of her hand, and Clint digs the heel of his palm into his forehead.

“A girl is walking to her grandmother’s house to bring her food. She meets a wolf in the woods, and the girl doesn’t know any better, so she tells him where she’s going. The wolf then finds the house, breaks in, and tricks the girl into believing that he’s her grandmother, only really, he’s got her in the closet. In some cases, the wolf even eats her, but the girl never figures it out until it’s too late.”

“Hmm.” Natasha hums quietly, and the rain splatters a little more severely against the windowpane. “Sounds deceptive.”

“Yeah.” Clint lets out a laugh that sounds more like a strangled sob, choking down the rest of his words. “It is.”

She continues to stare in his direction until he looks away, and it’s not that he doesn’t want to touch her – _god_ , does he want to touch her – but it’s new to him, to have so much blood on his hands that’s so personal, and he can’t understand why someone already drenched in so much red would want to add someone else’s ledger to their skin.

 

***

 

The day after the rain, he pulls on some old sneakers that he’s unearthed from the back of the closet and a black hooded sweatshirt that smells about as old as he’s starting to feel. Armed with his sheath of new arrows and collapsible bow, he walks the now familiar path to the clearing that Natasha had first pointed him towards some weeks ago. The wet grass gives way to slippery mud that finds its way into the thin soles of his shoes and in the waning afternoon light even the trees seem despondent, their canopy less sprightly than normal, water logged leaves weighing down branches that block out the sun.

Clint drops to his knees, flops onto his back, and sends an arrow into the sky, letting it fly with practiced fingers. It wedges itself in one of the higher points of trunk, and he releases another in quick succession, feeling the comfortable pull of his arm as he watches it hit its mark. He’s on the verge of going for a third round when the sound of footsteps makes him flinch, his body tensing with anxiety before the rational part of his mind takes over with the knowledge that there’s only one person whose footsteps he would be able to detect without thinking about it.

_No one around here for miles, so you don’t have to worry about killing someone._

“Pretty good for someone who hasn’t slept in three days,” Natasha comments, eyeballing his latest hit as she comes up behind him. Clint snorts unceremoniously.

“Never slept in the circus, and I did just fine.” He sits up, wisps of wet grass clinging to his sweatshirt. In doing so, he manages to catch a glimpse of the bag clutched in her right hand.

“What the hell is that?”

Natasha shrugs. “Thought you could use some comfort food.”

He continues to squint in her direction until his eyes widen in surprise. Although his grasp of Hungarian is far from decent (but better than Russian, and she’d never let him live _that_ one down), he considers himself competent enough to get by. And besides, Clint knows enough about commercialized labels to recognize familiarity when he sees it.

“Burger King? Seriously?”

“Were you expecting rib eye? Because if so, I’d like to know when someone replaced Clint Barton with a very realistic life model decoy.”

“Very funny,” he mutters as he reaches out, unable to stop the grin from spreading across his face. Natasha doesn’t hesitate as she drops to the ground in front of him, immediately falling into habit as she leans back between his open legs and slips her head into the curve between his neck and his shoulder. One of Clint’s hands circles back around her chest, his palm resting against the soft fabric of her black tee shirt, and she delicately steals a single fry from the carton clutched between his fingers.

“This is nice.”

“It is,” she agrees with softness so natural it seems almost foreign. He inclines his body forward and moves his head to steal a sip of her drink, lips closing around the top of the straw, adjacent to the tips of her fingers. Her hair is freshly washed, warm against his cheek, and he can tell she’s been using the shampoo she keeps on hand back at the house - a floral scented concoction she would never be caught wearing otherwise, but then again, seeing Natasha in jeans, free of guns or knives or even a holster, was about as abnormal as anything that the outside world would expect of her.

“We should stay here.”

“We should,” she echoes, and he moves again, bringing his legs in line with her own. His mouth hinges on the next question, his brain wanting to know the answer but his emotions wanting to avoid it.

“When does Fury want us back?”

“He didn’t say.” Natasha sits up, turning to face him. “Told me it was up to us, that when we come back, he’ll have something waiting. Until then, I guess we’re free.”

Clint scowls. “Free to do what?”

“I don’t know. To rest. To think. Maybe we just need to…re-learn. Remember everything that we’ve forgotten.” She wraps her hands around her legs as he reaches over, closing his fingers instinctively and protectively, the callouses of his palm pressing into her otherwise smooth skin.

“Natasha…” He trails off, struggling and failing to find the appropriate words for the feelings roiling through his stomach, because whatever he says, he knows it won’t be nearly enough for her or for them.

“I’m sorry.” The words, when they finally come, sound useless on his tongue and taste of deceit and laziness, but he pushes them through anyway. “I’m sorry for what I told him. About your past…the files…about everything.”

Natasha glances sideways through a curtain of red, a veil of obscurity shielding an already unidentifiable look. “It wasn’t your fault. I told you, Clint. Monsters and magic and…” She sighs, sounding defeated and tired at the same time. “And you didn’t know what you were doing.”

Clint feels his anxiety rising, threatening to overwhelm his senses. “But I still _did_ it.”

“Well, here’s some advice: take my word and don’t dwell on what you did or didn’t do.” She falls back onto her elbows and he glowers, digging his fingers into the grass with impossible force.

“Fuck you, Natasha.”

He lashes back because he can, because it feels good, because he needs to feel _something_ other than the helpless rage that courses through his veins and refuses to release its hold. Grabbing for his bow, he angrily discharges an arrow that zings sharply into the sky, disappearing into the trees. Natasha turns her head, something akin to amusement dancing through her pupils, though the majority of her face continues to remain unreadable. Clint blows out a breath in frustration.

“Look, I can’t take back the fact that you put your trust in me and I disobeyed it. Okay? Whether or not it was me…it was still _me_ , Nat. I can’t apologize for that, hell, I can’t _live_ with that, not if you’re going to be like this about it.” He searches her eyes, the pain of something desperate crawling over his features like a virus that threatens to paralyze him. “Just tell me that I fucked up, tell me at least that I did something wrong. Please.”

Natasha brings a hand up, the breath moving out of her body in one slow pull, and drops her arm to her side.

“It’s not that,” she says finally, and there’s a sharpness in her tone that’s impossible to ignore. He lowers himself beside her until he’s fully stretched out, bodies aligned and perpendicular, faces turned skyward.

“What happened?”

She swallows, her eyes still refusing make contact in his direction. “There was…fighting. A lot of fighting. It got intense and Bruce got mad, which is what Loki wanted…anyway, long story short, I ended up being the unfortunate result of wrong place, wrong time.”

Clint bolts up without thinking, piecing together the fragments of puzzle that she fails to say out loud, his hands twisting angrily into his side. “Oh fuck, did he –”

“No,” Natasha interjects quickly, following his lead, and maybe he doesn’t exactly have to know, at least in this particular moment, about how the most capable assassin S.H.I.E.L.D. had ever seen spent most of the battle curled in a fetal position, scared of her own mortality. She brushes grass from her jeans. “Not…physically, anyway.”

Clint feels his face harden, rocking back and forth on his heels as his fingers pluck at the ground, pulling up damp green strings that disintegrate almost immediately in the heat of his palm.

“Jesus. I wish you would’ve told me.”

“Didn’t need to.” She leans over and wipes a trail of mud from the base of his neck with her index finger. “You had enough to deal with.”

“But I had no idea.”

“It didn’t matter,” she responds more severely. “All that mattered was that I was able to get to you before they did.” The finger pressing against his neck becomes firmer, digging into his pressure point, and the feeling pulls at a memory a time when they were still new and shy, when they slept with their backs to each other and with guns at their sides, untrusting yet trusting enough to hold the worst of each other’s secrets in their palms.

“They would’ve killed you, you know.” When she speaks again, her voice is rougher than he thinks he’s ever heard, and the sound is almost startling. “If it wasn’t me. They would’ve killed you.”

“Tasha…” He stops, unsure of how to continue as her finger starts to tremble against his skin.

“They would’ve killed you.” She repeats the words over and over again and he gently takes her hand, removing it from his throat and folding it over until it stops vibrating of its own accord.

“But you didn’t.”

Natasha flinches. “I _wouldn’t,_ ” she corrects him fiercely, her mouth emphasizing every syllable as if she’s trying to convince him of something that her life depends on. Clint reaches for her shoulders, drawing her back against him, and he almost wants to revel in her response, in hearing that much defensiveness in her tone, a feeling of the fact that she’s still fighting for him, no matter how fucked up he is and how much more fucked up he could get.

“I know.” He pauses, tightening his hold, and brushes hair away from her neck. “You’re my partner, remember?”

She doubles into him like a child at the words and he turns his gaze to the sky in response, tries to ignore the multitude of lonely arrows, each one hanging off the branches of sad looking trees, like the parts of him that have been ripped away and now hang silently in an endless void, waiting for someone to catch them and carry them home.

 

***

 

She waits until they’re in bed to say it, waits until he’s counting the still fading scars that line her forehead, when he’s cataloging them so that he can try to remember which ones he gave her, which ones he wasn’t there for, and which ones she gained on his behalf.

“I can’t cry.”

She doesn’t sound sad, she doesn’t sound disappointed, she just sounds like Natasha, always nonchalant and unyielding and pushing her feelings down underneath years of practiced default, even in his presence. He traces a finger over a jagged line that runs from her eyebrow down to the back of her ear.

“Me neither.”

She reaches up and steers his hand back to his side, her own fingers inching over the scabs of teeth marks littering the scape his forearm, her breath hitching in her throat as she works her way over the raised skin. He catches her eye at the touch, understanding settling between them.

It’s not something he’s expecting, and maybe that’s why he feels that it’s okay when her mouth closes over his, crushing his lips in an intense hold. Still, his first instinct is to pull away, to hold back, and he feels his hands twitch against her bare arms.

“Do you want to stop?”

Her lips part just barely and he struggles to draw air into his body with ragged breaths, his pulse throbbing and threatening to burst from his throat as he swallows down her scent, and he knows the answer in his mind long before he can gather the strength to say the words out loud.

“No.”

She leans forward and this time, the kiss is slow, tender and gentle as if she’s exploring him for the first time, as if it’s Budapest all over again, before Loki and before brainwashing and before a battle that they both know robbed them of more than just their strength.

“Do you want this?” She asks again, quietly, before her tongue slips between his lips, one hand trailing over his bicep. He groans as she slides her mouth down his neck, running her teeth over the skin covering his collarbone.

“I seem to recall the last time we did this,” she continues when he doesn’t respond, in between pressing her jaw to his skin. “But if I remember correctly, there wasn’t a bed involved.”

“There was…that was…” He arches up, feeling his toes curl into the bottom of his feet as she traces down his stomach. “Fuck,” he breathes out, digging his mouth into the part of her shoulder where her shirt has slipped away. At the sound of her increased breathing, at the way her body tenses in response to his touch, he wrenches away, suddenly feeling small and insecure and every inch as vulnerable as he knew he was the day that S.H.I.E.L.D. found him on the side of the road, wet and homeless and starved. Natasha pulls back, studying him intently with her head angled imperiously to one side.

“What?”

“It’s just…I just…” He fumbles over his words as he lets his eyes travel over her body, the way her fingers are spread against the lower half of his stomach, edging towards his groin. “Aren’t you scared I’m going to hurt you?”

The look in her gaze softens as she smiles, lowering her face.

“I’ve been hurt,” she says quietly, guiding him inside, one hand securely fastened around his cock. “And I’ve been saved. The difference, Clint…” She pauses as she maneuvers her body on top of him, both graceful and passionate at the same time, grinding back and forth in careful, trained moves until their rhythm has synced in the exact easy way he remembers.

“The difference is that there’s only one person in my life who’s done both, and that’s why I love him.”

The ease in which he loses himself inside of her is a relief for everything he didn’t know he needed, their fingers entwining almost unconsciously in the bed sheets as if they’re both seeking support in each other’s grasp – familiar and unfamiliar territory, memories that taste new and old and unspoken all at once, a gaping hole they can only close by fusing themselves together. When he comes, it’s a desperate cry for release from secrets, from fear and pain and the actions that words can’t say or won’t apologize for.

In the small house seven and a half miles outside of Budapest, she wipes a trail of water from his cheek with the same detached manner that she would wipe away someone else’s blood, and he reciprocates in silent support.

“Do you ever think about it?”

“About what?” She cards a hand through his hair with half-lidded eyes, fingers loosely entangled in the strands, and he realizes that he’s forgotten how long it’s been since she hasn’t tried to turn away, since he’s felt they could both look at each other without the fear of seeing pain, of seeing hurt and worry and everything in between.

“The first time we met. Here.”

Natasha smiles, her lips curving slightly as she pulls the covers over them, settling back into the pillows.

“Yes.” She leans into the arm that closes around her waist, a surrounding of something that’s soft and warm and firm.

“Yes, Clint. I think about it.”

 

***

 

This is what Clint Barton remembers about Budapest: There was a girl, she was supposed to raise her gun, but instead she fell in love.

This is what Natasha Romanov remembers about Budapest: There was a boy, he was supposed to raise his bow, but instead he fell in love.

This is what Clint Barton and Natasha Romanov remember about Budapest: Love is for children, love is a debt, love is a stolen kiss and a safe house and a promise. Love is a blanket of security, a solid landing pad when you jump too far and too quickly, a sense of real in a world otherwise filled with monsters, real and imagined. Love is a tear in your heart that bleeds into your chest until someone reaches in to stitch it back up, a scar that will forever be branded on your organs, hidden under layers of skin until someone rips it off and makes it hurt all over again. Love is a secret that you can keep until someone tries hard enough to unearth it, like a messy game of operation. Love is terrible and wonderful and scarier than anything in the world, but in the end, it will save you, if you let it, if you try hard enough.

This is what they remember.

And this is what they’ll never forget.

**Author's Note:**

> Among the inspirations for this fic - [this graphic](http://isjustprogress.tumblr.com/post/67593056402/execution-empress-by), and Vienna Teng, who has long provided sources of inspiration for many of my favorite fictional couples and whose new album included a song that immediately brought to mind Clint and Natasha the first time I heard it.
> 
> "call it any name you need.  
> call it your 2.0, your rebirth, whatever –  
> so long as you can feel it all,  
> so long as all your doors are flung wide.  
> call it your day #1 in the rest of forever.
> 
> if you are afraid, give more.  
> if you are alive, give more now.  
> everybody here has seams and scars.  
> so what. level up."
> 
> \- Level Up


End file.
